The 2024 MacStories Selects Awards
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Hello and welcome to App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vittici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? I'm doing great. Happy Mac Stories Selects Awards Day to you. To you as well. This is a big day at Mac Stories. This is an annual tradition that we've been doing for the past few years. For all those who don't know what the Mac Stories Selects Awards are, a brief recap.

Every year for the past four or five years, I want to say, we have awarded our favorite apps of the year in different categories, physical awards. We've been making for the past few years physical awards that we send to the creators of our favorite apps of the year organized in multiple categories. There's obviously the app of the year.

There are categories like best design, best new app, best new feature, best Mac app, best watch app. And I think a couple of years ago, we also added this additional category, which is a lifetime achievement award, which is an award that we don't give out lightly.

It's an award that we give to an app that has made history on Apple platforms, an app that's been around for a few years, that is unique, that is exceptionally well-developed, and that has had an influence on the overall market on the App Store. Yeah, I think Federico, we did a really good job last year with our Lifetime Achievement Award. It was none other than Pixelmator. Well...

We can say that Apple acquired MacStory Select's award-winning app, Pixelmeter. Exactly, exactly. We're not saying that if you win this award, you're going to get acquired by Apple. But hey, it has happened one third of the time. So we've given the award. We're also not saying it, you know. Exactly. So this year...

It's the same categories as last year. But there's obviously a change. And the change is, first of all, video. If you're listening to App Stories, you know that there's also a video version that you can watch on YouTube. And for this week's video version of App Stories, I think it's an extra special one because John has the awards physically on his desk. Right now, they're hidden from you. Yes, they are.

But they are on his desk. And as we announce each category, John is going to hold up the award so that everybody can see it. And those awards, soon after we publish the story on the site, will be shipped out to the winners. Globally. Globally. And the second change is that this year we have a bigger team. So it wasn't just John and me picking the winners for each category. This year, Ni Le-Anne,

Jonathan and Devon also contributed to the selection of the MacStory Selects Awards. And it was a very exciting process. We talked about this behind-the-scenes process in the pre-show for AppStories Plus members. And so go check that out. It's not available in video. It's audio only. You can find it in your AppStories Plus feed on Memberful and Club MacStories.

And that, I think, is all we need to say up front. We have a packed show. Why don't we get started, John? All right, let's do it. We're going to start with the Lifetime Achievement Award, okay? Okay. So I'm going to do the big reveal here on video. I'm reaching, reaching for the award. Here it is. The winner of the 2024 MacStory Selects Lifetime Achievement Award is none other than Transit. Transit, the Transit app.

Yes. That Neilion recently wrote about. This is... I'm going to try not to bump my mic with these boxes too much, Federico, but... You have so many boxes there right now. It's incredible. I have all these. I'm surrounded by boxes. But Transit is an app that's been around for a very long time. One of my favorite things about it is its design. I mean, it's a design that has...

evolved over time, but has been recognizable from the very beginning. Like if you look at the lineage of where it is today versus where it was in the early days, you would definitely see the relationship there. And that's because it was just a very strong design from the very get-go. And

It's done transit in a way that's kind of unusual and unprecedented for these kind of apps, because usually when you find a transit app, they're just not that great. They're usually done by some kind of local government or something, and they're kind of janky. But transit has incorporated transit info from around the world in cities big and small everywhere to help you find your way around a town or a city, both on foot and

bicycle, bus, train, it really covers the entire gamut. And you'd think that at this point, this many years into the life of an app, that it would be done innovating. But the fact is they aren't because they can actually, they've actually had an update recently where they use the accelerometer to tell what's going on.

that you're traveling through a tunnel. So if you don't have coverage, it can still track your trip as you're using the app. So you know when you're going to arrive at your destination, even if you're under a tunnel for a long period of time, which to me is just amazing and really cool. So I love this app. Congratulations to the team at Transit for winning the Lifetime Achievement Award. Yeah.

Yeah, and when we were selecting Transit, we went back and looked through the Mac Stories archives. I believe the first mention of Transit was 12 years ago or something like that. That's a long time ago, yeah. It's been around forever. That is the definition of a lifetime achievement. It really is. It's almost as old as Mac Stories itself, I think. Yeah, so congrats to Transit for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Mac Stories Selects 2024.

The next category, John, what you got for me? What do we want to talk about? Do you want to talk about the best new app?

I do want to talk about the best new app. And before I do that, I want to say that we cover a lot of new apps at Mac Stories every year. That's our bread and butter. So as you guys say in America, you love your bread and you love your butter. Oh, we do. You do. That's what we do at Mac Stories, though. We love covering new apps. We love talking about new apps. And look, we had plenty of choices and plenty of options. But...

We thought that the ideal recipient for the Best New App Award would have obviously to be something made by indie developers. We love our indie developers. We love developers who care about the craft of making software for Apple platforms. But it also had to be something that we used on a daily basis. And no aspect of our jobs...

except for AI maybe, but no other aspect of our job has changed as much as the social media landscape has changed in the past two years and especially this year. And so the award for the best new app of MacStory Selects 2024 goes to Croissant. All right. Croissant. There's the award. Best new app. John is showing off the award by Ben McCarthy and Aaron Way.

So Croissant is a cross-posting utility that supports Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads, and I think that's all the social networks that we have at the moment, right? Yes, the main ones. The main ones. It supports multiple accounts, and it's the sort of utility that started small and has already been improved with a series of really nice updates. I believe it's now on the iPad. It's now on the Mac.

Yes.

promoting our work as a smaller independent website is essential to being able to reach people where they are. And so to use something like Croissant, something that is so elegantly designed and that does one thing extremely well, we couldn't think of any other app, any other new app in 2024 that was more deserving of this award than Croissant. The simplicity, the

with which you can select multiple social networks, even tag people, tag the same person across multiple social platforms. So the same username getting automatically converted between Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky, that's an excellent feature that Croissant has. And of course, being a product designed by Ben McCarthy,

You know, Ben, you know, they like their puns and their attention to detail. And yeah, Croissant took over the sort of our Apple community when it came out and we never stopped using it. And so when it came to select a new app for this award, we knew it had to be Croissant.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's done a great job, you know, expanding to suit people who want to just maybe use it to cross post on a couple of accounts or a dozen accounts because I use it with an awful lot with Mac stories. And the thing that I appreciate about it is that most of the services that do this sort of thing are designed for big enterprises that have dedicated social media teams and they cost a lot of money.

Whereas croissant is a very reasonable subscription for an individual or a small business that maybe doesn't do as much as something like Buffer, but handles the core stuff that you need as an individual or a small business very, very well. And I really love that. I was using it with iPhone mirroring before the Mac app came out.

but it's great to now have it native on the iPad and the Mac as well. So congratulations to both Aaron and Ben on the award. We also wanted to mention as a runner-up in this category for Best New App, Simple Scan by Greg Pierce, the creator of Drafts and the upcoming return of Terminology, I believe, the dictionary app. Simple Scan, as the name suggests, it's a simple scanning utility

that takes advantage of the document recognition and vision capabilities of the iPhone and iPad to give you a very simple scanner with some really nice quality of life features for power users, such as, for example, the ability to bookmark a specific folder in the Files app,

where you want your scanned documents to always end up. That is an advanced implementation of the files framework on iOS and iPadOS. And I think if you've been looking for a scanner, you know, a lot of people now use files or notes and the built-in scanning functionality to scan their documents there. But maybe sometimes you just want to have a little scanner icon on your home screen. You just want to have something, once again, that does one thing very well. And Simple Scan, you know,

We wanted to mention it in the runner-up for best new app because it's an excellent utility made by a previous, I believe, Lifetime Achievement Award winning app, Drafts, if I'm not mistaken. That is correct. Yeah, that's correct from a couple of years ago. Or the very first one, I think, actually. No, the very first one wasn't a Peacock. Oh, maybe the first one was Peacock and Drafts was second. Okay.

Time is a flat circle, Federico. All right. What's next? It's time. I'm going to handle this one. We have the winner of the best design category, which is ShareShot. ShareShot is a fantastic app on the iPhone and the iPad for framing screenshots. Not unlike, in some respects, Federico's own shortcut called

called Frames, but because it's a native app, it can do a lot more than a shortcut can do. It does these incredibly beautiful gradient backgrounds that can incorporate either the colors from the screenshot itself

or various ones that are just kind of in the built-in library. You can adjust things like the drop shadow. You can do all sorts of things that make it look really, really good without a lot of effort. And I think that that's what's really important about this app, especially the fact that, you know, on the iPhone, that's where I use it the most.

It's really just a single view, but it's still got this depth of advanced functionality that really required a lot of thought and care to make work in a single view type of app. And really one of the things that like when you're taking screenshots, one of the things I appreciate the most is

is that if you have a screenshot on your clipboard and you open the app, it'll immediately ask you if you want to use that thing on the clipboard as the screenshot you want to frame. And that just takes a step out of the process and makes it a lot easier. It also, if you don't have...

screenshot on your clipboard, it will look at the first screenshot in your photo library and suggest that one, which also saves time and makes it easy to do this stuff. You know, you can, if you're doing a series of them, I'll take a screenshot, frame it, and then I'll go take another screenshot. And as I'm framing that one,

When I open the app back up again, all of a sudden it's suggesting a new thing to frame. So it just makes the process fast and easy and it integrates with shortcuts and just does a fantastic job of taking what can be a tedious task and making it fast, simple, and easy to figure out.

Yeah. It's not an easy task to be able to condense so many advanced controls into a single view type of app. And so that's why we thought that ShareShot was an excellent example of how to design a modern experience on Apple platforms for power users without making it over complicated or difficult to use. So yeah, congrats to ShareShot, the winner of the best design in MacStory Selects 2024.

We wanted to mention a runner-up in this category, and it's the New Reader by Silvio Rizzi. The New Reader is not an app for everyone.

I don't use it personally. It's not my preferred way to access my Mastodon account or my Blue Sky or my RSS subscriptions. But at the same time, I have to recognize that Silvio Rizzi's design skills are unparalleled on Apple platforms. The new reader is a beautiful, polished, high-performance experience when it comes to navigating multiple feeds online.

with fluid transitions in the sidebar, incredible scrolling performance, even when you're scrolling through hundreds of posts, because now the app has a unified timeline. Right, right. And it's doing that with all these different services, all of which have different APIs and different, you know, I'm sure different performance characteristics when it comes to pulling that information in. Yeah, so...

The new reader by Silvio Rizzi is the runner-up for the best design category of MacStory Selects. Okay, it's now time for what was arguably, I think, in our conversations with the team, the most challenging. It was this and the best new feature. There were two categories that we really had to talk about.

the five of us to come to a decision. Now we're talking about the best app update. Now, you know Mac Stories. We love our app updates. Just like we love our new apps, we love covering updates. We love a good update.

We love a good update. We love developers who update their apps to take advantage of the new features of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS in the fall. We have a whole section of Mac Stories Weekly for Club Mac Stories members called App Debuts, where we talk about new apps and updated apps. So we are really into checking out the latest update to one of our favorite apps. But there was one, John, this year that sort of showed me the future in terms of

What can I do with all the hobbies that I have? And what can I do with all the video games I want to play? And all the movies I want to watch? And all the TV shows I want to watch? And the books I'll never get to read? Right. And so the winner for the Best App Update category of MacStory Selects Awards 2024 is...

Sofa 4 by Sean Hickman. There we go. There's the award. Sofa 4. Sofa 4 came out toward the beginning of 2024 and you covered it on Mac Stories. I did. So Sofa has been around for a few years. We've been covering Sofa since the very first version of Mac Stories. Sofa is a downtime tracker. It lets you keep track of

of all the media that you're interested in, whether that's video games, books, movies, TV shows, podcasts,

Now I believe you can save links, you can save any kind of content into Sofa. And it does that with a really polished, elegant UI, with thumbnail previews, list-based organizations, a shelf element where you can pin your most important item, a section where you can log the games that you've played or the books that you've read. But this year, in Sofa 4,

Developer Sean Hickman spoke to the power users like us and added a feature that John and I, we have mentioned so many times on App Stories because it's the kind of feature that we love. And that is smart searches with custom filtering criteria. These are called ingredients in SOFA. And with ingredients, you can basically define custom properties for all of the media items that you save into SOFA.

This is how I've been using Sofa as the video game tracker for the dozens of video games that I want to play and that I want to talk about on Unwind with you, John, but also on MPC with Brandon. I have been able to transform Sofa into an advanced game

gaming tracker with properties for things like the platform I want to play a video game on or the original release date of a game or who recommended a game to me. All of these custom ingredients you can create for yourself. You can say this ingredient, this custom property, I only want to use for video games or maybe I only want to use for a book, right? It doesn't make sense to have an author property for a video game. That's for a book.

Later, once you have all these custom ingredients, you can create smart lists based on them. And so that's how in Sofa I have a backlog list that uses my backlog property, backlog ingredient to assemble all the games that I want to get to at some point. It's how I created a list called played in 2024 that filters the plate status by release year. I have another smart list

That allows me to see the older games, the retro games that I've played this year and the retro games in my backlog. Sofa 4 opened so many different possibilities for people who save a lot of content into the app and want to make sure that they have a way to break down all of their items based on different criteria, based on different properties.

It was the kind of update that adds a lot of functionality without, and this is a trend this year, just like we mentioned with ShareShot, it added a lot of features for power users without complicating the interface, without making Sofa more difficult for all kinds of people

The power is there when you need it. You got to go look for it. And if you do, you're going to find all of these new options made available to you. So that's why we wanted to pick Sofa 4 as the best app update of 2024. Yeah. And I really appreciate the fact that Sean has expanded it beyond just traditional media, because one of the things that I've done is I've created a list of restaurants I want to try. Nice. And with things like

the ingredients that Federico's talking about, I can do things like have an ingredient that's the town that it's in. So I know how close it is to where I live, right? Which that's not going to make sense for video games or books, but it makes perfect sense for a restaurant when you're trying to figure out where you want to go. So yeah, there's a lot you can do. It's incredibly flexible, yet very elegantly designed. Federico, we have a couple of runners up here, and I think I'll let you do the first one if you'll let me do the second one.

Of course, the first runner up in this category is Remind Me Faster. Remind Me Faster by indie developer Nick Leith is a reminders utility. It's basically a scratch pad to more quickly and more easily enter a new reminder with a priority or a due date or maybe in a specific list or maybe with a specific location.

You know, reminders. It's an excellent task manager. Apple has built a really, really flexible task manager for consumers and power users alike. But we remind me faster, you have an even...

well faster way of entering those reminders. You open the app, it's an empty text field and there's a couple of gestures that you can use to quickly switch to a different list. There's natural language recognition so all of your natural language dates get automatically parsed and entered in the reminder as a due date. You can set priorities, you can set templates and presets for locations. It's really well done and this year

It was updated with a new gesture to quickly switch between lists. You can just swipe with your thumb above the keyboard to instantly open the list switcher menu. And also it received support for customizable lock screen widgets

as well as controls in Control Center. So now you can create a control, for example, and put it at the bottom of the lock screen or maybe in Control Center itself or maybe assign it to the action button. And you can configure that control to always save, for example, a reminder into a specific list. Like if you are a Reminders Power user, you need Remind Me Faster. And so that's why we wanted to mention it as a runner-up in this category.

Yeah, I also want to mention GoodLynx 2, which I wrote about back in August. And it got two very big features with version 2.0, which are highlighting

and note-taking. So you can highlight any stuff that you've saved into the app to read later, and you can assign notes to those highlights, which is something that has really been missing, I think, in GoodLynx for a long time to make it really a complete research tool. Now it really can do a lot more than it did before. And those features are also built into the shortcut support too. So you can do things like find highlights

highlights in your Good Links library using shortcuts, which then you can obviously do things like take those highlights and export them out to some other app, whether it's Obsidian or Notes or whatever, whatever you might use for collecting quotes and things that you might highlight. So congratulations to Good Links too as a runner up for the best app update for 2024. All right. The next category, John, is all yours. All right.

So we are going to talk about Mac apps. We have the best Mac app of 2024, and I'm going to launch right into it. It is Moom. Moom 4 came out a little earlier this fall, and it's a Windows management app. It's incredibly customizable. If you have a layout that you want to create with Moom on your desktop or on your laptop screen, you can accomplish it with Moom and access those

easily and quickly through all kinds of shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts and so forth, or the the Moom interface itself. It's been around for a very long time. It's always been a favorite, I think, of MacStory's readers and us too. And this year though, it's really kind of taken it to a new level because there's a lot of competition for this. In fact, even Apple came out with its own way to manage Windows on the Mac with Sequoia this year.

But, you know, it's a very typical Apple feature. It's kind of a entry-level kind of feature where if you have very simple needs for Windows management, you can use what comes with Mac OS. But Moom really does a great job of expanding what can be done for users with their window management. So congratulations again to the team who made Moom 4.

All right. And what do we have as a runner up? And as a runner up, Federico, we have bezel because bezel has been around for a while. It lets you frame on your max display, an iPhone or an iPad. And they even have like a vision pro app now, but.

But for me, what I've used it for primarily are the iPhone and the iPad, where you can live view what's going on on your iPhone on your Mac screen. And the thing that really sets it apart this year with this update is that they added the ability to record your screen and take screenshots. So if you're doing any kind of

you know, like screen capture recording that you want to use and maybe a tutorial, put it in a YouTube video, whatever it might be. It's really easy to do now with either kind of a built-in background or you can do it on a transparent background, which makes it easy to composite with, you know, other video that you might be putting together. So congratulations to Bezel. That app has come a long way in a very short amount of time and it's become one of my favorite utilities on the Mac for dealing with my iPhone and iPad.

Nice. All right. Moving on, we now have the best watch app category. We do. Now, this is always a tricky one to pick because there's not many developers who are building standalone modern watch apps these days. But there was one in particular that we wanted to highlight this year because it's from a developer who's been doing some really...

exquisite work across all of Apple's platforms from iOS to Vision OS. And so the winner or the best watch app award MacStory Selects 2024 is Chronicling by Rebecca Owen. Now, Chronicling...

This is another tracking utility. And chronicling lets you track anything, whether it's a habit or chores or anything that matters to you in your life. Chronicling lets you create these different data points, these different habits or call them whatever you want to. Maybe it's something that you need to count over time. Maybe it's a habit that you want to keep up.

Maybe it's a chore that you need to do around the house on a weekly or daily basis. Chronicling lets you create all of these different items and allows you to keep track of them over time in plenty of ways. The app is powered by SwiftUI charts, really colorful, extremely native to Apple platforms, and it's available everywhere from the iPhone to the watch to VisionOS on the iPad. It syncs with iCloud and on the watch.

It's especially nice because Rebecca was able to condense the really data-heavy interface of chronicling down to very simple interactions that are ideal for the wrist. So you can have custom complications for one of your different habits.

And you can click on those and it takes you into Chronicling where you can quickly check off something that's done, for example, or say, yeah, you know, I've vacuumed my apartment today. Thank you, Chronicling. And, you know, you have this very slimmed down but still usable and information dense interface on the Apple Watch screen.

And, you know, to have this kind of modern utility that has expanded beyond the iPhone and iPad era

to the Vision Pro and the Apple Watch from an indie developer, it's a rare thing these days. And so we looked at Chronicling and we thought this is the kind of example that we need to cover, that we need to award with MacStory Selects. And so that's the best watch app of 2024. Congrats, Rebecca Owen, for winning with Chronicling. Yeah, Chronicling is a great app. I've really enjoyed using it.

We have a couple of runners up here, too, because this was another one where, to me, one of the things I think is interesting, Federico, is that although the watch app category can be hard to pick because there are a few developers who are really making watch first applications,

apps, there are still a lot of, because the watch has improved in its technology and power, there are a lot better watch apps than there were, say, three or four years ago. And we're seeing more people be able to do more things with the watch than they've done in the past, which is why we have a couple of runners up. Yeah, the first one is Peak.

Peak Fitness Widgets, I believe is the full name on the App Store. Peak allows you to basically create widgets and complications for all kinds of health kit-based fitness metrics. So whether that's steps or miles that you've walked or steps that you've climbed,

workouts is another data point. On the iPhone, you can create all of these widgets for very specific data points. You can put them on your home screen and that allows you to have a much better visualization of all of those categories that typically would involve opening the health tab. On the iPad,

Peak is a whole dashboard UI with all these different tiles where you can see all of the different metrics. And on the watch, on the watch you can have complications. So it's another example of taking something that is really data heavy, right? Lots of charts, lots of numbers, and condensing it down to the experience of an Apple Watch. So to have the new widgets, right?

in watch os 10 this year uh or watch os 11. what version are we up to now is the apple watch series 10 but it's watch os 11. yes they're off they're off by one uh to to those new widgets uh the the they have complications so you can you can basically create whatever you want with peak on the apple watch and and i'm just i'm really a fan when selecting these watch apps

I tend to, I personally tend to prioritize those that take a preexisting experience and try to optimize it and rethink it and slim it down in a way that makes sense on the Apple watch. That's what chronicling did. And that's what peak also does and why we wanted to mention it here. Yeah. And, and our other runner up that we wanted to mention does the exact same thing, which is Zenitizer because Zenitizer is a meditation app. And Zenitizer,

What impresses me about this app more than anything is that in four swipable screens, it has condensed down an entire iPhone app onto the watch with full functionality without losing kind of the design aesthetic that

the iPhone app has. It has, you know, the same color scheme. It has a very similar look to the iPhone, yet it's shrunk down to a little tiny square. And it uses iCloud to sync, you know, the data like your timers and things you've set up between the two. So it really is fully functional on the watch, which is nice because, you know, if you have a

few minutes to meditate, you don't necessarily want to pull out your phone. You want to actually probably put your phone away and be in the moment and using the watch for that kind of thing is perfect. And this, the design of this app is just absolutely fabulous everywhere, but especially on the watch. So we wanted to mention that one too.

Okay, John, we are approaching the end. We have one regular category to go. Then we have the Reader's Choice Award. And then it's going to be App of the Year time. It's time for the best new feature. And I mean, I've said what I've said about Mac Stories. We like new apps. We like app updates. And we like features. We sure do. And it's hard to pick one.

And so we had to think, what is something that as, what is a feature of an existing application that has fundamentally changed maybe some of our habits or maybe some of our workflows? And we were pretty much all in agreement after much deliberation that there was one in particular that has changed how we watch YouTube and how

So the app that wins the 2024 MacStory Selects Award for Best New Feature is the channel inbox of Play by Marcos Tanaka. Play is a utility for saving videos for later.

We've been covering Play since the very beginning, since it came out a couple of years ago. And the app has continued to grow over time. Marcos is a previous recipient of a McStory Selects Award a few years back, I believe, with Music Harbor. And Play, this year, completely changed the concept of

I just want to see the new videos from my favorite channels on YouTube. It shouldn't have to be so hard, right? But when you open the YouTube homepage, since it's an algorithmic homepage, it can be surprisingly challenging to just see what's new from the channels that you follow.

The Play Channel Inbox first debuted last year after the MacStory Selects Award. It was a latecomer to 2023, but this year it continued to get better and better. The Play Channel Inbox allows you to manually add a series of channels that you want to follow or import your existing channels from your YouTube account via the Google Takeout Export Archive. So you can take all of your channels,

Put them in play. And in the channel inbox, you have a simple list that you can group by day or you can group by channel of just the videos from your subscriptions. It's refreshingly simple in a way that the YouTube homepage can never be because of the algorithm. And there you have support for...

display certain properties instead of others. You have support for multiple gestures. You have support for filtering the inbox. You have support for, you know, just using drag and drop, for example. Like it's got all of these features that allow you to

quickly triage all of the videos from your subscriptions, add them to the queue or not. You know, it's, it's become my favorite way. At the end of the day, I just opened the channel inbox and I see what's, you know, like, okay, delete, delete, delete, save for later, save for later. Like,

It's so simple and so well done. And then, of course, you know, Play also received, like Play the app itself also received a whole bunch of features this year from better picture-in-picture support, being able to extract chapters from videos, jump to those chapters thanks to timestamps. It's got a whole bunch of updates this year, but the channel inbox, if you are the type of person who watches a lot of YouTube like I do, but...

Sometimes it can be a bit of a time sink, you know, to just open the YouTube front page and get sucked into whatever algorithmic recommendation is thrown at you. So to have this kind of simplicity in a modern, deeply native experience that integrates widgets, shortcuts, iCloud sync, you know, it runs the gamut of modern Apple integrations. It's been lovely to use.

Oh, I love it too. I, you know, one of my favorite parts of it is are the gestures, the fact that I can double tap on a video and it immediately goes to my watch later queue. And I just do that kind of top to bottom on my list. And at the end, whatever I don't want to watch, I delete. And now I've got everything waiting for me in the queue. It's, it's really fast and streamlined for that kind of thing.

I want to mention, Federico, two runners up. Okay. The first one is the SQL Magic Lookup feature. And SQL is a past winner of a MacStory Selects Award from last year. And this feature, though...

I like these two features in contrast to one another because they both involve AI in their own way. Because SQL is probably was one of the first examples of AI integrated into an app that gave me hope that we weren't all going to have to live in chatbots forever. We weren't going to have apps that are trying to displace writers and creatives and artists and things.

Because what SQL does with the magic lookup is that say you're reading an article on Polygon about a video game, and you're like, oh, I want to check that out later. I want to play this game at some point in the future. You can access SQL through the share sheet and...

And it will use AI to analyze that article, pull out the name of the video game, and then you can send it directly to SQL without having to go to SQL. So you're still in the article that you're reading. And when you're done, you're right back where you left off in the article you're reading. It's not disintermediating anybody. It's not taking away from that website. It's just...

getting rid of that friction, allowing you to save something that you're reading about in the moment without having to switch between a bunch of apps. So congratulations to Roman on that. I think great job on that feature. And the other one I wanted to mention is Halides. It's the opposite of this. It is. That's what I mean. It's Halides Process Zero. This is the other end of the spectrum of AI. This is a feature that's designed to put human creativity first.

focus in you know in at the center of this feature is human creativity because it doesn't process your video or your photos at all what it does is it just lets you take the picture and save it to your your photo library whereas you know Apple has its computational photography and that is doing things with HDR and white balance and all this other stuff

to give you a picture that most of the time looks pretty good, but doesn't always, and maybe isn't exactly the look you're going for in any event. So with Allied's Process Zero, you can do that yourself. You do the tweaking yourself. And it's not a feature that I use every day, but I'm really glad that it's there because it gives users choice. And if I want to have a day where I'm like, you know what, I want to go take some artsy photographs of some things

that are in a particular style that I have in mind that doesn't really comport with Apple's style, I can do that now, which is great. So that's the other runner up for the best new feature of 2024. - Now this Reader's Choice Award this year is gonna be an easy one. The Reader's Choice Award is selected in three stages. The Mac Stories team assembles an initial list of potential candidates.

Then there's the sort of grand public of Mac Stories Weekly subscribers casting their initial votes.

and selecting their preferences. And then there's the Discord members making a final decision as to what should win the Reader's Choice Award. And this year is pretty easy because it seems like club members pretty much agree with us. The winner of the 2024 MacStory Select Reader's Choice Award is...

Play by Marcos Tanaka. So, Marcos, you're getting two of them this year. Congratulations, Marcos. All the things we said about play apply here. Those features, they clearly resonated with people. They resonated with our members. And that's why it was a close race between play and...

SQL. So SQL is the runner up in this category. Both excellent apps, excellent utilities for different purposes, both about media, which maybe tells us that people, they sure love their media trackers, you know, whether it's YouTube or video games, they really do.

So congrats again to Marcos for also winning the Reader's Choice Award. Yeah, this year was unique in that we had our first ever tie for the Reader's Choice Award when it came to the initial vote. And we had to do a runoff between play and sequel. And even then, it was incredibly close. So these are both fantastic apps. And congratulations to both of them on the votes from all the members.

It's time, Federico. It's time for the final big reveal. I feel... I kind of feel like Jeff Keighley right now. You are. Six days from now, Jeff's going to be doing your job. The nominees are... The nominees are... Elton Ring DLC. Wait, wait, wait. We need to do a world premiere video first. First, check out this world premiere. No. When we were thinking...

about this year's MacStory Selects. We knew, I knew, and I think we all knew what the app of the year was going to be. The sort of app that has not only captured our imagination, the sort of app that has become the conversation in the Apple community and in the tech community this year,

the sort of app that makes people happy, that gives people a chance to relax and spend some quality time reminiscing about good old memories. And it's the sort of app that also comes with a political message in terms of, for two things, what the future of app distribution on Apple platforms look like

what competition in app marketplaces can lead to when it's healthy competition, and also the importance of game preservation. And if you haven't figured it out by now, it's my pleasure to announce that the app of the year for MacStory Selects 2024 is Delta.

The Delta Gaming Emulator by Riley Tested and Shane Gills is the app of the year for MacStory Selects. Look. Congratulations. As I was, I wrote the entry for the app of the year in the article. And you can check out that segment. But I began that segment with,

by saying that very few technologies in my life have shaped me as a person who's interested in technology, as a person who's interested in gadgets, as much as the moment that I first tried the Nintendo DS did. I remember so vividly going down to my local video game store, guy, you know, in the turbo, going down to the store,

Because he called me one day and said, look, I got something to show you. Come here. And somehow he managed to import a Japanese Nintendo DS unit and a Japanese copy of Super Mario 64 DS. Wow. And he handed me this DS. I was...

15 or 16 at the time it was 20 years ago exactly 20 years ago wow and i remember the first time i put down the stylus on the ds touchscreen and i controlled mario with the stylus i knew that my life in a good way was going to be ruined forever in the sense that it showed me it showed me the power of a touchscreen way before the iphone or the ipod touch ever existed and so delta

20 years later is recapturing that magic, that sense of

Rediscovering an old Nintendo console and allowing people to play through some of their favorite games from not just the Nintendo DS, but also the Game Boy, the Game Boy Advance, the Super Nintendo. Delta, it's not a new app. It's not new this year. Delta has been around for a while, but it was only available through the old version of Alt Store. The non-jailbreak, sort of jailbreak-y method of installing games

Apps not fit for the App Store on your devices. But this year, in large part, thanks to the DMA in Europe, and then also thanks to Apple seeing that maybe competition is a good thing, Delta became available officially in two places. Via Alt Store in the European Union, but also thanks to Apple changing their App Store rules globally on the App Store, because the App Store now supports video game emulators. And Delta...

not only took over the App Store for multiple weeks, it was literally the most downloaded free app on the App Store for about 10 days or so. But it also became the poster child of this new era for the App Store. One where video game emulators are allowed. One where game streaming services are allowed. And the sort of era where Apple...

in the face of regulation, seems to understand that it's maybe time to let go just a little of their tight grip on the App Store and app distribution. And then there's the fact that Delta

As I wrote in my story, it's just an excellent app. The way that it allows you to play with high performance and a native UI for iPhone and iPad, older games. It supports iCloud Sync. It supports Dropbox. It supports game controllers. And all the quality of life enhancements you would expect from a modern emulator. Save states, quick save, the ability to organize your games and to add custom artwork.

And the other thing that makes Delta special, and we have a little something to announce here, is you can install custom skins. Custom skins to make your iPhone, if you don't want to use a game controller, a physical game controller, you can make your iPhone look like a Game Boy or look like a Nintendo DS. And that's why...

To celebrate this occasion, I had this idea of commissioning Sean Fletcher. Sean has been making incredible skins for Delta, especially with the focus on the Nintendo DS. Sean has been making incredible skins, and they've been selling those skins on Gumroad. And I thought, well...

This is fun. And I commissioned three special Max Stories themed skins for the Nintendo DS in Delta with a very subtle references to Max Stories and the Max Stories colors. And you can find them on Gumroad. We have now a Gumroad shop where you can go and spend $3 to get these custom skins to make your...

iPhone running Delta look a little bit fancier with a Mac Stories logo and an incredible looking clear version of the Nintendo DS. Yeah, I love that. I love all three of them, but that's my favorite, I think. Yeah. So that's a little something extra that we did on the side, but that, you know, that is just to say that

Aside from the creative community and what people have done with Delta, both in terms of skins and also in terms of controller attachments. You see, Delta also spawned this sort of sub-market of creators making skins and making custom contraptions to sort of hold your phone and use it with joy-cons, for example. So this is the kind of app

that has had all kinds of positive effects on the Apple community, from creators to players to just developers being able to release game emulators on the App Store. And...

There was no other app that we felt encapsulated all the values that we care about in Mac Stories, made by indie developers who really care about their products. They went and spoke at the European Commission. Riley did, and it was incredible to watch. Made by indie developers who really care about their craft.

An app to play older video games that are maybe not so well preserved anymore. Right. An app that is native to Apple devices. It just, it ticks all, it checks all the boxes. It really does. And so congratulations to Delta. It's our app of the year for MacStory Selects 2024. And just go play some old Pokemon or old Super Mario and you're going to have a good time.

Yeah, yeah. Congratulations to Delta. This app, it's amazing to me the amount of change and impact that two people have had with a single app. As Federico said, it's not a new app. It's been around for a long time. We've used it for a long time, but their persistence over the years and the change politically worldwide with regulation of app stores,

created an opening where they were ready and they were able to not only have Delta available worldwide now, but also be the first alternative app store in the European Union, which for two people, that's a lot. And it's pretty amazing. And I, you know, it's great to have known

known them for so long and to see this app finally see really what it deserved, which is the light of day in the app store itself because, you know, it wasn't easy to install Delta before this. Not always that easy and

Now it's just as simple as any other app. So congratulations again to Delta. Can you show off the award again? Just one more time. One more time. Here it is. One more time for the app of the year. There it is. Round of applause for the app of the year. Congrats, Delta. Congrats, Riley and Shane. And for our runner-up, we have Raycast. Raycast has been around for a long time. We have written about it on Mac Stories. They've been a sponsor of the site. And...

That app has really taken off with the advent of AI. I think there have been a lot of features added this year. They're not all AI features, but I think the AI features are a big part of it because it allows you to, with hitting a hot key, to enter a chat very quickly with multiple different LLMs. And so that's a really powerful feature to have that at your fingertips when you're using your Mac.

So congratulations to Raycast on runner-up for App of the Year. Federico, I think we've done it. We've done it again. We've done it again. Another episode in the bag. Another MacStory Selects, another year has gone by. Yes. And now it's time to get ready for 2025 and...

Congrats again to all the developers. And thanks to all the developers who work with us every year, send us information and beta versions of their apps. And thanks to our readers who tune in. I've been tuning into Mac Stories for 15 years now, and it's our privilege to be able to write about apps. You know, it's what we love. It's what we love doing, and it's why we love celebrating apps and indie creators everywhere.

who are especially important now in the face of serious risk, you know, against creatives in all industries. I think it's important to stop for a second and celebrate those who put in the work and put in the time to hone their craft and release software that

I feel strongly wouldn't exist anywhere but on Apple platforms. So congrats to all the winners. - Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself Federico. Yeah, congratulations to everyone and thanks to everybody for tuning in. Make sure you check out the accompanying article on Mac Stories. We have both an article by Anil Ion about the Lifetime Achievement Award

And the pictures and the pictures of the awards, like there are the photos that John took. Yes, I take very special photos every year, backlit by my Christmas tree. So check those out. I think they turned out really well. The artwork has been updated this year. So we've got a little bit different look to the awards. So the pictures are worth checking out. And we've got the Roundup article where we've all pitched in and written about each of these apps that Federico and I have spoken about today.

All right. Well, that's it for another episode of App Stories. You can find us at MacStories.net. We're on all the social media platforms that we talked about here today, thanks to apps like Croissant. And you can find Federico on those social media platforms as at Faticci. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And you can find me as at John Voorhees, J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.